Why 'Fahrenheit 451' does not age well at all

Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 opens with one of the most iconic opening lines to grace modern literature: "It was a pleasure to burn."

The novel, fiery from the start, explores a dystopian society where books are illegal. When a book is discovered, it's burned, its owner is arrested, and the house the shelters both book and owner is burned down. The people responsible for policing those books are called "firemen," who are responsible for starting fires rather than putting them out.

The book's anxiety of tech — the novel particularly admonishes the increasing prevalence of television — comes across as curmudgeonly and simplistic. Modern readers who have grown up with tech, surprise, have not been reduced to TV-obsessed zombies. (Though many, many of the same fears of television have been leveraged against smartphones and social media.)

"In its simplistic nature of telling how important books are, [the book] also simplifies television and entertainment in this type of didactic way," says Mashable Culture Editor Peter Allen Clark.

Furthermore, the book's treatment of women is completely abhorrent. Montag's neighbor Clarisse is a manic pixie dream girl at best and the narrative is exceedingly unkind to Montag's wife Mildred, who is written as a two-dimensional stand-in for everything that's wrong in Bradbury's vision of the future.

Where the book DOES succeed is in its world building, setting up a particularly unsettling atmosphere of this dystopian future. The novel's hunting robot the Hound, for instance, continues to inspire fear, due in large part to Bradbury's terrifying description of the beast:

"The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse... It was like a great bee come home from the field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself."

It's these types of descriptions and this type of world building that has seared Fahrenheit 451 into our collective memory. But here's to hoping that HBO's new adaptation can update the critiques that the famously modernity-phobic Bradbury ("I don't describe the future. I try to prevent it," Bradbury often said, reports the Peoria Journal Star) tried to explore when he constructed a world that burns books.

This week on the MashReads Podcast discuss Fahrenheit 451. Join us in the episode above as we talk about the experience of rereading the book as adults.

Image: Simon & Schuster

Then, inspired by the novel, we talk about our other favorite books about books including Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee.

And as always, we close the show with recommendations:

Martha recommends Spotify music podcast Dissect. Each season of the podcast focuses in on one music album, devoting each episode in the season to dissecting one song. The show just launched their third season which focuses on Frank Ocean's album Blonde. "It's really, really fascinating. the host takes on each song and breaks down, track by track, the lyrics, the production. It's pretty fantastic."

Peter also recommends a podcast: The Next Picture Show. The show is a movie discussion podcast that takes a new movie and discusses it in relation to an older movie that it echoes. "They speak about movies with a level of depth and knowledge that I really hope to possess one day. I really love these voices and these people and I think they're some of the best film reviewers in the world and I am glad I get to listen to them every two weeks."

MJ recommends two books. First he recommends The Power by Naomi Alderman, a novel that envisions a world where women suddenly have the power to shoot electricity from their hands. The book then explores what happens when women are given this power that men do not have. "Once I started I could not put it down. What I love about the book is that premise is so simple, but I think the idea is so fully realized." He also recommends Tin Man by Sarah Winman, which follows two characters and looks at love, grief, friendships, and more over the course of their lives. "The book is so emotionally rich. It's beautiful, the entire book feels like poetry."

And as always, if you're looking for more book news, be sure to follow MashReads on Facebook and Twitter if you want to keep up with even more book news this year.

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